Nice graphics. The game was a bit confusing and disorienting though, seemed like chaos and carnage without a lot of actual game-play action or reason. Not very difficult but also not very intuitive. You may want to go back and edit some of the in-game text for accuracy.

It was pretty easy (agreed about better English translation though). Nice atmosphere, generally enjoyable. I felt awful leaving that little boy all alone, especially after stealing his dog!

My biggest gripe is that I don't really understand the story -- did that woman get killed to summon weird fire demons, or something? And completing the pentagram sent them away? What happened to everyone who "disappeared"? Maybe I'm just in dumb mode today but I didn't see any cohesive explanation.

This game strikes me as having the fundamentals down. Halfway decent music, graphics, gameplay, etc. It works, doesn't outlast it's welcome, and doesn't leave you with a sour taste in your mouth once you've finished it.

What it lacks is the extra polish needed to draw someone into the game's world. I never felt like a person escaping a dire situation, I just felt like someone playing a game. There's a prevailing sense of blandness to the experience that I was never able to shake.

There are two things that could improve upon this and help to kick the game up a notch.

1)Who are you? Maybe you purposefully want to make the player feel like they're the character, but there are dangers to doing that when you don't give the player the power to make any choices because it doesn't really give you a sense of being anyone at all then.

The key moment for me here is when you heal the boy. There's something very sterile about it, especially once you take his dog and then later when you don't even take him with you. What kind of a person would act this way?

Many adventure games give you a sense of character by letting you click around the environment and hear what the character has to say about things. In this way you can build out a personality. Make me care about the person I'm playing and I'm much more likely to become invested in the game. This simple feature can do more than just tell you what your character is thinking though...

2)It can also help you to build out the world. Where are you? What is the context for the game. Okay, obviously we know we're in a subway and that there was some kind of accident. But when the game ends we don't really know anymore than that. Simple descriptions as the player clicks on things give you a chance to drop clues and draw the player further into the world with little details that flesh things out.

*
I certainly understand the desire to maybe keep things simple or even to purposefully tell a story without much in-game text, but in my opinion giving the game world and character more depth is one of the best ways to draw someone into a game.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to submit this game. I enjoyed playing it and can't wait to see where you go from here...

Fairly amusing, easy, straightforward, and logical. Nothing wrong with that - at least it was easy enough to do without a walkthrough. I do love the visuals, and while it is a little simplistic, I can see the amount of detail and heart that was put into the game.

I was really excited for this game at the start, but then I found myself feeling a little alienated by what the protagonist could and couldn't do.

Review, spoilered for length:

This game is one of the nicer-looking in the batch. Your start screen and logo look wonderfully polished and made me feel hopeful about the game itself, and in the the looks department, it really didn't disappoint. The environments were great, and I really enjoyed the visual effects you had. The flickering was a very nice touch. It did a great job of setting the scene as a place that was not quite in working order, and made the backgrounds feel really alive. The little touches like the smoke and sparks worked very well, too. And the inventory with the closeable backpack was quite nice.

On the not-so-awesome side, the humans (dead and alive) looked unnatural, as did the dog. It wasn't enough to ruin the game, but everything else looked so great that it was a little noticeable. And I felt that the game could have benefited from some transition effects when the player uses an item and changes things. When the fire just disappears, or the dog isn't there at all when getting the keys, or the ghosts and spider are there one frame and gone the next, that looks a little off. You don't need a full animation if that's not something you know how to do, but maybe find some way to make it less abrupt?

It was also hard at times to distinguish objects from the background, like with the crowbar and gun. I would not have known they existed if I hadn't gotten frustrated and started clicking everywhere. Some of the arrows are unintuitive, too, especially the one going toward the door that the dog has to search. If it's pointing at the bottom of the screen, it looks like we'll be going backwards, not forwards. And the arrow at the pipe puzzle isn't immediately obvious. It could really stand to be more distinct.

The music is great, and really gives the feel of being in a tense, urgent situation. I liked the sound effects, too.

Unfortunately, the text you had really didn't work for me. I'm usually pretty forgiving about English errors, but there were quite a lot of them here. I think it would be a good idea to work with a proofreader next time, especially if English isn't your first language. Also, the tone was really inappropriate for the situation sometimes. Why does there need to be a smiley on the description for the stick? Why does the player character talk about how they've always dreamed of pressing the button, but have nothing to say about the piles of dead people lying around? And I realize the blood is useful, but most people are not going to react with "oh, how can I use it?" when looking at a puddle of human blood.

The descriptions for the stick and crowbar seem to be switched, too.

I like that you included a pipe puzzle. It's great to have things in escape games that break up the "find things and use them on other things" pattern. But the pipe puzzle doesn't provide much of a challenge- pipe puzzles in general are pretty easy, but there are only 6 tiles to rotate here, and 3 of those have obvious placements. I like solving pipe puzzles, so it was a little disappointing that it was over so fast. Maybe think about making the pipe puzzle a little tougher? Also, why not add a few more puzzles or minigames? It's okay to have just one, but (at least in my opinion) it's better to have more of them, with a range of things to do.

The ghosts and spider looked good, but as they were, they felt more like obstacles than threats. As far as I can tell, the ghosts killed all these people, yet you can stand around in front of them forever without anything bad happening to you. I'm not saying "kill the player for touching a ghost", but it's good to have your gameplay match up with your story. As long as there's enough time for the player to get away from the ghosts if they don't know how to fight them or don't have the right item yet, I think having the ghosts actually being a risk could have helped the game feel more cohesive. I don't really understand the spider, either. Why is there a giant spider? Is it some kind of supernatural creature? Use the spider if you want to- it's a very nice spider- but you need to make it belong in your setting.

And I felt really limited in my interactions with the boy and the dog. The boy appears to be the one other survivor of what happened at the subway, and I can't talk to him, or try to get him out, or anything besides putting a bandage on his leg and taking his dog. His face doesn't even change after his leg is bandaged. I understand if he's in shock and doesn't want to talk to me, but when the game doesn't let me even try to talk to him, it feels very off. He's an injured child surrounded by corpses and blood, any normal person is going to feel bad for him and want to help! And even though he's been bandaged, he's still injured. He's still going to have a harder time moving around on that leg. And I don't want to take away his dog! I understand borrowing the dog, but I felt really bad about taking it away permanently.

I guess the big problem I have with this game is that it feels like you didn't see how this would have to be a little different in tone from the kind of escape games you mostly see. This game isn't about exploring a nice, pleasant room, and solving the puzzles in it to get out. It's a survival situation. There are dead people and blood everywhere. Your protagonist acts like they're exploring a nice, pleasant room full of puzzles to solve, and that's really... not a good fit for the setting you've put them in. It doesn't mean that the game has to be grim and bleak! Most action movies with a focus on survival manage to be fun to watch, but the characters still react to threats differently than they'd react to happy exploration, and still (if they're good people) show concern for others who might be less able to fend for themselves.

When you have an invisible and/or silent protagonist, what that does is cause the player to fill in the blanks with "me" or "average human". The more you see the protagonist asserting their own personality, the more the protagonist becomes their own character. Silent/invisible protagonists have their place when the story lets them act like an average human in that situation would, but that means showing empathy for small, injured children, and not giggling over how much you want to press the button (except maybe in a nervous, gallows humor type way.) If that's what you're going for, I think you need to give the protagonist more opportunities to react in a human way to the horrible things they're seeing. Let the player click on the bodies and wreckage and see the protagonist emote about them. Let the player show concern for the boy, and maybe take him with us at the end.

If you want a protagonist that doesn't react in an average way, that's okay, too. Maybe you want the joke to be that they're treating a life or death situation like an escape game! That kind of thing can work, but you have to establish the protagonist as a separate person from the player. Maybe show what the protagonist looks like? Definitely let the player click on things, even things that aren't useful for the game, and show how the protagonist reacts to them. If you're going for the protagonist as their own unique character, you need to give them all the opportunities that fit to show who they are.

Remember, your game isn't the same as the other games out there that already exist. Different is good- if your game was the same as every other escape out there, why would you need to make it? But different also requires consideration. You need to think about what you're doing that veers off from the formula, and what other parts of the formula need to change along with it.

I didn't give Risk Subway Escape one of the lower scores, but I couldn't really give it one of the higher scores, either. But it's possible that the time limit interfered from giving this game the polish and editing and repairs that it deserved, and I'd really like to see you go back after the competition and iron out some of the kinks. Because really, this game could have been great, and I think with a few fixes I would have really loved it. And if you're done with Risk Subway Escape, then I hope to at least see more games from you in the future.

After finishing the wire puzzle, I could not get away. Did I miss anything? There were no arrows on the screen that I could see

Overall, I feel the game was a bit random ( spider?) and would have gained a lot with a bit of a back story . At first, I thought that

The man hanging out from the window and the hand you could see on the left on the other page was the same person chasing me! I was looking forward to a zombie themed game so the ghosts and the spider did not impressed me much...

I did like this game in that almost everything was logical in what to do (though I couldn't see the gun) and the graphics weren't bad. But it would have been better to have no comments at all instead of "I've always dreamed of pressing this button". I mean, what?

I know I'm late playing, but I have to say that I really enjoyed this =)

I also loved the way the story was so skeletally outlined to enable me to fit in my own imagination and my own character and background story.

I had no problem working out what to do, or finding the "mouse-over" arrow.

Where the boy is concerned;

if the dog was his pet, as it seemed, it has probably left to get help after doing that one task for the escaper.
Much better to leave him where he is, for the time being, safe, than drag him around heaven-knows-where into who-knows-what new danger.
The dog will be back for him.

The button for opening doors made me chuckle.
Most of us [who haven't been stuck waiting for train doors to open] would prefer to press the "go fast" button in a driver's cab.

I'm appreciative there were no jump scares (I was afraid the whole time because of that), and like the glitching atmosphere (as in a bad security tape). I just wish everything was explained more. Whats the story behind everything we see? The developers may have understood it as they made it, but they never put anything in to explain it to us who play it. Also, as everyone else says, the English needs polishing, too.

That's it? The game took me a few minutes to finish, and all I get is "You win" With nothing else? No rewards for beating the game, like- oh, I don't know- A BACKSTORY? I mean, you're just dropped into this situation, it takes you a few minutes to get out, and you don't even find out what had happened.... I don't get it!

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